How To Wipe Out Religion

As a thought experiment, mostly linked to a piece of fiction that I have been drafting, the question of how to go about eradicating religion has been upon my mind.

So… how would you go about it?*

Erm… First Of All, Why Bother?

Let me turn to the eminent voice of Atheism in the 21st Century, Richard Dawkins:

Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money (‘God wants you to give till it hurts’). Imagine no Taliban to blow up ancient statues, no public beheadings of blasphemers, no flogging of female skin for the crime of showing an inch of it.**

Enough said, surely?

How Big Is The Problem?

According to the Gallup International Millennium Survey, conducted on the eve of the 21st Century, the following shows the percentage of people who would identify themselves as belonging to any kind of religious denomination:

From this data, admittedly now some 10 years out of date, it might seem that for people growing up in a global society, there are rather too many ignorant people apparently unaware that they can, as Dawkins puts it, just leave their religion as one might choose to change a school or job.

At the time, the global percentage of believers came out at 87%, while Atheism stood at around 10% of opinion. If we were to assume that today some 85% of the world was religious then we might be talking about some 5.95 billion people from the nearly 7 billion on the planet.

How to convince those 5.95 billion people to simply ‘give up’ their religion?

What Has Been Tried Before?

Well, the obvious starting point would be the joint efforts of the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists to eliminate two key world religions: the Nazis chose to target Judaism whilst the Soviets attacked Christianity.

The Nazi solution was to exterminate the Jews. Round up these less-than-human beings, shoot or gas them, and bury or cremate the bodies. It proved remarkably effective apart from the tedious detail of those pesky Allied armies defeating the Wehrmacht and putting a stop to the plan.

In the Soviet Union the systematic destruction of churches, imprisonment and execution of believers, and coercion of the Christian hierarchy proved reasonably effective, at least on the surface. The problem, of course, was that Christianity simply went underground. Once the Soviet regime fell it seems that the faith of the people resurfaced with a strength that quite startled the politicians.

I suppose that, while we are on the topic of eradicating other people’s religion, we should mention that attacking and conquering countries with such backward ideas as Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism was also tried by ‘Christian’ Imperial Britain and other European countries. Again, whilst the Crusades and other Missionary movements had some success they also tended to marginalise the ‘fanatics’ in other religions, driving them underground and even towards violent or non-violent protest.

Overall, however, as simply killing all the ‘faith-heads’ in the world seems rather excessive, we’d better try something else.

Education, Politics and the Media

As with all problems in the West, perhaps we could see education as the key. After all, it’s simply a matter of explaining to deluded people how the great wisdom and knowledge of science has cleared the way for people to simply change their minds. As Dawkins himself has pointed out, they can simply give up this pesky religious superstition and get on within a much better world, free from violence and greed and tribalism.

How do we go about that? Well, in 2004, the government of Britain decided that Atheism should be taught in Religious Education lessons at school. This must have been a welcome start – at least the non-religion can be clearly compared to the actual religions. By making sure that we can show how human thinking can answer all of the ‘big questions’ that seem to crop up in people’s minds over time, then we’d have taken a great step forward.

What we also need to do is to silence those scientists who keep on insisting that their own religious convictions are compatible with scientific theory. The usual process of simply suppressing inconvenient claims which run counter to the idea that science disproves God should be enough – it has certainly worked fairly well throughout the last century.

Following this, we could outlaw all religious office and make sure that no religion has any direct power within the governmental systems of all the nations in the world. Marginalising religious impact upon politics, such as by stripping out the House of Lords in Britain and disconnecting the monarchy from the concept of Divine Right to Rule, would take us a great deal further along the path.

The media do a fine job of reporting all the evils that religious people perpetrate in the world, so this must be encouraged. Freedom of the press to point out the howling insanity of religious ideas will help to promote the idea that the sane and proper, enlightened and liberal mind is one which rejects supernaturalism. We should obviously close down any religious media, such as radio stations or television channels which propagate religious belief. Those peddling televangelists can simply be taken off the air.

It’s All Just a Matter of Time

Given enough time without the polluting meme of religion propagating freely in global society then, let there be no doubt, we would achieve the enlightened state of all peoples being ‘Bright’. It’s all just a matter of time.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which all schools teach us how the unsophisticated past was populated by such outmoded beliefs as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Instead, let the classrooms ring with the cheers of liberated human beings discovering the reality of a life with only sky above them.

Imagine, if you will, a society freed from the bonds of religious organisations, able to pursue the mutual care for the species inspired by the reality of a purposeless existence in a hard, unfeeling universe. With the news media daily reminding us of our duty to ourselves and to the species, to survive and thrive upon the world we have sprung from, we can be assured of our destiny to reach out from our now barren planet and seek other rocks from which we can mine resources. Imagine how much money could be re-directed into taxes to pay for the great exploration of Outer Space which might lie before us?

Who could resist such a vision of the future? It is, my friends, all just a matter of time. And no-one has to get killed.

Unless, of course, those religious fanatics keep shooting at us.

___________

* Whilst this article has been written with tongue very firmly in cheek, I really am interested in how religion might be eradicated. In my own fiction it takes a combination of plague, war and genocide to achieve this end. Would it really take that in reality?

9 Thoughts on “How To Wipe Out Religion”

There are a couple of big ‘buts’ in your argument, even if it is tongue in cheek.

Dawkin’s is not suggesting that the world would be at peace if religion disappeared. Most conflicts are over culture differences and resources shortages, neither of which are going away anytime soon. The point he is making is that we have enough things to fight over without the idiocy that accompanies unprovable arguments about whose invisible magic friend is better.

The second big but is that 85% of people are not religious. About 1% of the UK population regularly go to a religious ceremony. Only about 5% go as often as once a year. Even in strongly religious cultures, the figures are not massively higher. Ask most of these people specific questions about their beliefs, e.g. is OK to use condoms, and there will be massive differences between what people say and the religion’s official line.

Less than 5% of people are actively religious and follow the specifics of their religion.

But to answer your question, I have two different recipes for destroying religion (or at least it’s power base).

Recipe 1. – Do Nothing.
The better educated, more westernised a culture becomes, the less it follows illogical, unprovable claims dating back to the middle ages. As the dominant and most persuasive culture around, westernism will dominate the world for the foreseeable future. So just sit back and watch the power of religions wane as people become better educated.

Recipe 2. – The Proactive Approach

a) Treat religions like any other business.
Thus they have to pay appropriate taxes and above all cannot make false claims about their products. So when a preacher say “The word of god can save you” he has to back that up with verifiable evidence or face prosecution by the advertising standards agency.
Additionally, religions cannot discriminate. They must allow women and gays at all levels to be preachers. This would not have any real effect other than driving millions away from religion, repulsed as the priests desperately trying to explain why being homophobic and misogynistic is acceptable in a modern organisation.

b) Teach all children critical analysis from an early age.
Ideas such as cause & effect and how the scientific method works should be central parts of the syllabus from year 1. The idea the authority, in any shape or form, should be questioned should be re-enforced repeatedly. Not only will that help destroy religion it will produce a generation of kids who aren’t as gullible for Homeopathy, UFOs, lies from politicians and other shit.

c) Ban children from joining churches
Until they are 18 and can choose freely for themselves, no child cannot be baptised, confirmed or otherwise formally made a member of a religious group. Once an adult, they can join any church they like. Given free choice, very few will join a religion.

d) Replace It
There is a need in some people’s live for religious and other illogical belief systems. The universality of religion in all cultures tell us that it forms an important social role. The fact that all the religions are radically different tells us that is does not matter what the religion is.
Develop a non-religious religion. One without out all that rubbish about gods but otherwise the same. Complete with regular services, hymns, prayer (meditation), ethical teachings and a welcoming attitude. If John Wesley can do it in the era of horseback and no money, a good 21st campaign could easily target religion’s traditional market.

Proof and oppresion have been provem not to work. To kill a religion you either need to wipe it out at a contollable source (eg. many of the earlier, individualistic pagan religions, or judaism where membership is linked to genetic line, so a highly specific course of action), or you take a long view and change the religion to something else (stand up Christianity ion the West) or you need to kill the human need for a religion. Finally, again a long view, but a gradual upswell of public opinion might be enough to destroy local religions; for instance if Catholicism was based solely in the Us the recent paedophilia revelations would be enough, in the hands of adept demagogues and media manipulators, to see it off.

But, in our current immature philosophical and social ways of thinking, it would be impossible to achieve. It would the same as persuading a very young child, brought up on tales of Santa that he never existed. The hope and need to believe would not fade.

@Chris – UR’s look on history is a little to big brush too, but as I am a history geek and UR is kind enough not to take me to task over my lack of knowledge of religions I think I can let him get away with that 😉

I finally read all three of your recent blogs. Nicely done. Where as religion is quite different from spirituality, we can eradicate religion and still keep the ‘inner bits’ that make us human. Re the National Geographic article finding the oldest gathering place might have been a worship center, rather than commerce, what makes us humans could be that spark of spirituality? It’s surely as old as we are. So why did we muddy it with all the cumbersome and mystic rituals? Why is it so territorial?
OK, enough, must get back to work.
Laura